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Thursday, 31 January 2013

"OAXACA, Mexico – To honour Idle No More’s global day of action, artist Sánez unveiled a new mural here Monday, January 28, depicting the water, corn and animals local indigenous people are defending against extractive industries. " NOW Toronto

"Today in Oaxaca City, Mexico a stunning new mural was unveiled to coincide with the Idle No More day of action that has been taking place across the globe. The mural is dedicated to ‘the people who organise to defend the common good’ and depicts elements of community life under threat in many indigenous communities: water, animals, crops and the communities themselves." Revolution Is Eternal for a world where all worlds are possible

“Thank you for your statement of solidarity and ongoing support!! We recognize that Indigenous people suffer the same violent colonialism globally. The Idle No More movement has given these issues attention, and will use strategic action to shift the current practice of expoiting the land and resources. We must also continue to build consciousness in our communities and build alliances. We support your struggles and look forward to working together in this spiritual revolution. In solidarity, Sheelah McLean”

Wednesday, 30 January 2013

Jerilynn Webster is a Vancouver based female hip hop artist, beat-boxer, performing artist, aboriginal youth educator, single mother, award-winning actor, and member of the Nuxalk and Cayauga Nations who is "using [her] words to go upwards/not backwards." She is an Idle No More organizer.

Published on 25 Jan 2013

Arthur Manuel is a spokesperson for the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade and Defenders of the Land network. Former chairperson of the Interior Alliance of BC First Nations, Manuel has been a leading voice of opposition to the Canadian government's agenda to "extinguish" Aboriginal and Treaty rights and assimilate Indigenous peoples into the Canadian body politic. Active locally in Secwepemc land struggles, and at the national level, he has also taken the struggle international at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, following in the path of his father, the late George Manuel, President of the National Indian Brotherhood and founder of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples.

Published on 28 Jan 2013

T'Uy'Tanat-Cease Wyss is Skwxw'u7mesh ethnobotanist, media artist, educator, and food security activist. She has stood up with other Indigenous Peoples to fight for native peoples' rights to hunt, gather, and fish in their traditional territories.

Tuesday January 22 2013

This panel is open to the public. All are welcome to attend, especially non-Natives to understand the long history of racism and colonialism in Canada against Indigenous people that has given rise to the current Idle No More movement, to highlight and lift the voices of Indigenous peoples resisting across these lands, and to think through how to be more informed and responsible allies.

* Territorial opening by Cease Wyss: T’Uy’Tanat-Cease Wyss is Skwxw’u7mesh ethnobotanist, media artist, educator, and food security activist. She has stood up with other Indigenous Peoples to fight for native peoples’ rights to hunt, gather, and fish in their traditional territories.

* Arthur Manuel: Art is a spokesperson for the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade and Defenders of the Land network. Former chairperson of the Interior Alliance of BC First Nations, Manuel has been a leading voice of opposition to the Canadian government’s agenda to “extinguish” Aboriginal and Treaty rights and assimilate Indigenous peoples into the Canadian body politic. Active locally in Secwepemc land struggles, and at the national level, he has also taken the struggle international at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, following in the path of his father, the late George Manuel, President of the National Indian Brotherhood and founder of the World Council of
Indigenous Peoples.

* Darla Goodwin: Singing Thunderbird Child-Twice Standing Woman is a Cree Ojibwa from Peepeekisis First Nation in Saskatchewan. She is a knowledge keeper, carrier of the Sacred Correction Pipe for the Desecration of the female side of life, starting with our mother the Earth. She is a ceremonial First Nations woman and an organizer for Idle No More.

* Glen Coulthard: Dr. Glen Coulthard is a member of the Yellowknives Dene and a scholar of contemporary Indigenous politics. He is an Assistant Professor in First Nations Studies and the Department of Political Science at UBC. He is a founding member of the Camas Books & Infoshop in Victoria and the Dechinta Center for Research and Learning in Yellowknives Dene territory.

* Jerilynn Webster: Jerrilyn is a Vancouver based female hip hop artist, beat-boxer, performing artist, aboriginal youth educator, single mother, award-winning actor, and member of the Nuxalk and
Cayauga Nations who is "using [her] words to go upwards/not backwards." She is an Idle No More organizer.

* Khelsilem Rivers: Khelsilem is a community organizer and language revitalization activist. Influenced heavily by his grandmother, he always believed in the importance of being Indigenous, despite encroachment of a foreign culture, society, and civilization. In this regard, Khelsilem has pursued avenues where he can strengthen all aspects of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw ways. He is an Idle No More organizer.

* Lisa Yellow-Quill: Lisa Yellow-Quill is Nehiyaw, Nekaway, Dakota from Treaty 1: Long Plains, Manitoba. She has many years of experience providing advocacy, support and counseling to women and families living with multiple-barriers, oppressions, and experiences of violence both in crisis situations and in complex long-term processes. This foundation has supported her ability to be a noted spokesperson on behalf of Turtle Island’s Murdered and Missing Girls and Women. Lisa is a Pipe Carrier, Sundancer, and Keeper of several Ceremonies.

Saturday, 19 January 2013

"This place I am in is called The En’owkin Centre…I won a 3 year scholarship to go there where once I used to till the land as a country girl, but this time around, I learned to become of the land….

Marie-Micheline Hamelin 2009

This piece is called Bitter-Root Woman….I am honored that the En’owkin Center kept this piece, it is a collaboration of myself and Bernice Morin…she formed the paper-mache and I created and painted the rest…..it was a lot of fun….I learned that the bitter-root itself is very bitter, in the same token, very healthy for the one’s vitality, and also very dangerous after it has flowered….

I have used: birch bark, found objects, plaster of paris, and acrylic paint"

Marie-Micheline Hamelin

9 feb 2009

from the mailbag:m: i am presently growing moringa tree, had a few leaves, very peppery tasting...on the slight hot side of things, love it...another name for it is horseradish tree..... still struggling to create....only inspiration is IDLE NO MORE....should get a group together to write and to create j: absolutely!!!I've posted a little bio excerpt & some book links for Marie-Micheline Hamelin on my pageBook Covers & Visual Artists

A translation is an x-ray, not a xerox. A poet translator is a xenophiliac.

Vsevolod Sventokhovsky,Letter “У”. The Terratological Alphabet series

Y

A translator spends a life asking y, but the I (even puffed up as the one Creator Eye) knows it's for u.

Z

Good translation of poetry is essential to a hungry reader .... writers still scrawl their words in a thousand scripts, pile them up on mounds of hope and futurity, awaiting translation. Translation is a zoo and a heavenly zion.

How did it all happen? “The word appeared the first…”. More words appeared later and started to be shown on stone, clay, papyrus etc. There is no need to say how spiritually, beautifully and originally the innumerable number of phrases and texts look in different languages and, consequently, in different scripts ...

I include this primer on the translation of poetry with pleasure and diffidence since I dislike dogma or prescription. Why not show preferences, to use Jorge Luis Borges' favorite word for choice, judgment, discrimination, and ...

H Heaven is the instant of translation. The poet in hot anticipation, with all the skills and preparation for walking in paradise, creates. I A translation aspires to independence, yet even when apparently achieved, the dream is ...

The two main questions [Randa] Abou-Bakr tackled during her talk were, “Is translating poetry at all possible?” and, “Why does translating poetry matter?” Although American poet Robert Frost once said, “Poetry is what gets ...

The more I live and the more I learn, the more I feel that all poets derive from one soul. If Yeats had been born in the late Tang Dynasty he would probably have been Li Shangyin 李商隐. If I'd been born in nineteenth-century New England and was a solitary woman, who knows but that I would have been another Emily Dickinson? If I didn't become her, well, then who would?

Perhaps because the colours of the books were evocative, the yin yang aspects of historical cross-cultural infusions and times of social unrest have been fresh in my mind, alongside my witnessing and throughout my fascinations through the same period, in the developments of Idle No More and the immediate processes of Can Culture.

Clear to me that the Harper fedgov approach of shoving it's way through has been received as a heightening of tension across the country, and that the corresponding shift from yin to yang on our part has been led by the only group socially positioned to make a stand, as a coherent collective.

Wu Jianren The
Sea of Regret+Fu Lin Stones
in the Sea

Not, as the haters would like it to be, as a monolith, or a multiplex being that all thinks, speaks, acts, rises and falls in a monotone, but through the diversity of real humans across a vast expanse of geography and historical experience and circumstance.

I expect that my family is not unusual, in encompassing the range of status Indian to Settler folk, with a wide swathe of mixed-bloods variously holding the middle space as tensions rise and fall between the perceived polarities.

I don't live in the vaunted Solitudes. I live in the Confluence.

goose teachings

Cherishing our leaders means, giving thanks to the Four Founders, Chief Spence, Shawn Atleo and Pam Palmater, and many less visible but no less indefatiguable activist-speakers, including the many non-indigenous who have added strength, face, voice, amplification to the collecting of being. It also means allowing them time to rest, as needed, surging forward to fill in the space.

In this way, those who are inherently inclined toward reducing multiplicities into polarities are kept on their toes. In this way, those who celebrate hostility by enacting it are kept busy, trying to find fertile ground for sowing division, whilst the weavers outpace them.

I appreciated receiving this letter from across the way. I think it acknowledges what is best about the soft revolution that we are currently experiencing, the fertile struggle, the fighting by many means: there is no "us" and "them." It just won't settle. There is the big shove that we have all experienced due to the choices and the blinkers of current leadership, and there is the big shove back by a multinational citizenry of many colours, religions, motivations and hues. History is long, the world both fierce and tremendous.

from the mailbag:

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Words haven't worked; time for action: Madahbee

UOI OFFICES (NIPISSING FN), Jan. 15, 2013 /CNW/ - "The best way First Nations and other Canadians can express their disappointment with federal indifference is to translate their concerns into action," says Patrick Madahbee, Grand Council Chief of the Anishinabek Nation. Madahbee said the 39 Anishinabek Nation member communities would be joining with First Nations across Canada - as well as the Idle No More movement - Wednesday in what will be the first in a series of National Days of Action.

"Canadians from all walks of life have implored the Harper government to reconsider the undemocratic manner in which they have stifled debate and rammed massive pieces of legislation through Parliament," said the Grand Council Chief. "These so-called omnibus bills threaten the safety of our lakes and rivers, the fish that inhabit them and ignore constitutional and legal requirements to work with First Nations on issues that affect our peoples. "Now other citizens understand our frustration. We have pursued all the proper political channels, but this government refuses to respect First Nations rights as referenced by Canada's Constitution, Supreme Court rulings, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to which they are a signatory.

"Harper may have pulled the wool over some people's eyes last week in Ottawa, but Chief Theresa Spence is still fasting for justice. We call on other Canadians to be understanding and supportive of our efforts in the days ahead to demonstrate to members of the Harper caucus that they were not elected to ignore the will of the people.